Monday, July 28, 2014

THE FOLLOWING MESSAGE WAS SENT TO US BY A LOCAL GROUP THAT IS DEDICATED TO DRUG ABSTINENCE. PLEASE GO OUT AND SUPPORT THEM.

The Society for a Drug Free B.C. is a part of an international network
of volunteers working on the educational side of our world wide drug
problem.

We have an entry in the parade for the
Tsawwassen Sun Festival on Monday Aug 4th, at 11:00 AM,
with a Model T and Miss Drug Free BC riding in the rumble seat, 25 to
30 volunteers to walk in the parade and 3 or 4 motor cycles bringing up
the rear. We will have a booth at Winskill Park as part of the festival
to provide educational materials to teachers, youth leaders, parents
and young people. http://www.sunfestival.ca

We
want to invite any DPNOC members to the parade and to visit with us at
our booth. You can always email or call me. After the event I will send
you some photos and a feed back. We are still in our baby stages and
this is our first event so thought we should let you know about it and
thank you again for helping promote it. We hope to be able
to network and even collaborate with you in the future.

Friday, July 25, 2014

Our colleague, Calvina Fay, of Drug Free America, forwarded this invitation to us about a major workshop upcoming at San Patrignano, one of the oldest, largest and most successful therapeutic communities for recovering addicts in the world.Please open the link and consider that, while the visit is not cheap, it may be very much worth the financial cost.

FYI – an invitation from our
colleagues in Sicily.

Calvina

Dear
friends,

we
would like to let you know about the second edition of the 7-day
intense workshop in San Patrignano to be held from November 7 to November
15, a new format we created to answer to the numerous requests of internships
and in-depth visits to our community to study our model first hand.

Further
information and registration procedure are available in our website at the
following link:

Opioid Drug Deaths Cost Half a Million Years of Life in the U.S. Each Year

In 1991, the band Nirvana released the classic album Nevermind and
Kurt Cobain was the face of the grunge scene that spread from Seattle
across the United States. If you’re old enough, remember back: it was a
gritty time that seemed defined by self-destructive heroin use. A new study on early view at the journal Addiction shows
that, at least in terms of opioid-related deaths, 1991 was nothing
compared to today. Between 1991 and 2010, opioid-related deaths
increased 242 percent. Today, deaths related to opioid use account for
one out of every eight deaths of people 25-34 years old.

The report, which uses coroner data from Ontario,
Canada, blames the rise not on heroin itself, but on prescription opioid
pain medications. The medical use of prescription painkillers is up;
the recreational use of these same prescription painkillers is up; and
deaths due to opioid use are up alongside use – from 127 deaths per year
in 1992 to 550 deaths per year in 2010.

Interestingly, the study didn’t leave its
description of the impact of opioids at the level of deaths alone.
Inside this number is a statistic called years of life lost. If
average life expectancy is 80 years and a person dies of an overdose at
age 75, that person would have lost 5 years of life. If a person dies
in the same way at age 30, that person would have lost 50 years of life.
Because opioids tended to kill younger people (median age 42), not only
is the overall number of deaths high, but the years of life lost to
drugs is staggering.

Overall, the study found that opioid drug deaths
cost the people of Ontario, Canada 21,927 years of life in 2010. These
years lost were greater than the years of life lost to alcohol use
(18,465 years of life lost). In fact, the years of life lost to opioids
were greater than those lost to pneumonia, HIV/AIDS, or influenza.

The authors point out that if you extrapolate the
data to the population of the United States, “where rates of opioid use,
misuse and death are comparable to those in Canada,” the drugs would
result in more than half a million years of life lost per year.

These drugs kill young people, taking not only
lives but, tragically, many years of life with each death. The study
writes, “The finding that one in eight deaths among young adults were
attributable to opioids underlines the urgent need for a change in
perception regarding the safety of these medications.”

Richard Taite
is founder and CEO of Cliffside Malibu, offering evidence-based,
individualized addiction treatment based on the Stages of Change model.
He is also co-author of the book Ending Addiction for Good.

Endorsement

"All treatment centres in B.C. should get involved and support the Drug Prevention Network. As one collective voice we need to send the message that treatment works and it saves lives. There are recovery houses, treatment centers, private, government funded, long term, short term, detox, therapeutic communities etc. Let's help support prevention and help educate the public."